citizen journalism: the emergence of middlemen

Blogburst
I’ve recently been touting the idea that rather than taking ownership and full responsibility for audience generated content, media and news organisations might instead want to explore creating relationships with bloggers and re-using (with permission) or linking to their content.

This is a win-win situation for everyone: old media gets the views of bloggers whilst, at the same time, the blogger gets traffic and kudos from old media. News and media organisations can’t afford to ignore audience created content but, at the same time, can’t afford to sift through, moderate, manage, and store all the content that’s already coming in.

Websites such as scoopt have stepped in as middlemen but I do think their existence is going to be short lived – before long, sites like flickr are bound to catch on to the fact that media and news organisations are already scouring them for photos when news happens and that they can potentially turn the millions of user submitted photos into saleable assets.

Now another service, blogburst (spotted by Mark Evans) has emerged to act as the middleman between old media and the blogosphere. the blurb on Blogburst’s website says:

BlogBurst is a syndication service that places your blog on top-tier online destinations. You get visibility, audience reach and traffic, while publishers weave the rich and diverse fabric of the blogosphere into their sites.

I can see why a blogger might want to join such a service but can’t fathom why a news or media organisation wouldn’t just go to the blogger directly if they wanted to reuse content. What value, if any, do services like BlogBurst and Scoopt add?

3 Comments

  1. Gah, yet more middlemen, the whole point is that you can link directly. Scoopt while offering a vaguely usefull service, they want you to give them exclusive licence to market your photos for three months, and after that a perpetual non-revokable licence for the rest of time! cheeky blighters.

  2. Hi, just wanted to clarify any confusion about why publishers wouldn’t just go directly to bloggers instead of through BlogBurst. In fact in some cases publishers have experimented with striking up relationships directly with bloggers. The nice advantage with BlogBurst though is that publishers can deal with one party (BlogBurst) that has many many blogs pre-screened for quality, organized by topic area, highly searchable and archived over time. Publishers select the blogs and/or specific posts they want to use through our Workbench, and then selected content is delivered through our API directly to the publisher’s sites. For publishers, this approach ends up being a much more streamlined way of finding, selecting and presenting blog content.
    Thanks for writing about BlogBurst, and please let me know if you have any other questions. Also, the official BlogBurst blog is at http://www.burstblog.com if you care to stay up to date on the service.
    Best Regards,
    Adam Weinroth
    Director of Product Management
    Pluck/BlogBurst
    http://www.blogburst.com
    http://www.pluck.com

  3. i dont know much about this MySpace but video blogging is very dangerous !!!!!!my kids have MySpace blogs and they seem to enjoy being on there because of the fact they have classmates on there with them!!!!!!!good luck with all your future accomplishments!!!
    sincerely,
    brittany

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